by M. J. Trow
‘Come again?’ Maxwell winced as a slug of the amber nectar hit his lips. Perhaps alcohol wasn’t the wisest choice with a face like his.
‘Douglas Russell received a letter four days ago. It came from an organisation called The Sepulchre Society of Sussex and it warned him – all of us really – off the dig.’
‘Did it, now?’ Maxwell was all ears. ‘What did it say?’
‘That’s just it,’ Fraser sighed. ‘I’m buggered if I can remember. I gave it to DCI Hall.’
‘Who didn’t take it seriously?’ Maxwell was not that surprised. He’d had a similar bum’s rush from Woman Policeman McCormick.
‘Looked at it like it was my bloody shopping list,’ Fraser said. ‘I thought it was a pretty important clue, in the scheme of things. David, I mean. Now Samantha.’
‘Doesn’t explain Martin Toogood, does it?’ Maxwell was talking to himself, really.
‘Sorry?’
‘Never mind,’ Maxwell shook his head. The waters were muddy enough already. ‘What did Douglas make of the letter?’
‘Well, I think he was pretty shaken. You’d have to ask him. What’s disturbing is the way these people can reach us. How, for instance, did they know Douglas was staying at the Quinton Hotel? How did they know where to find David? Samantha? I’m not easily rattled, Maxwell, but I have to admit, these people have got me peering round corners.’
‘What’s their beef, then?’ the Head of Sixth Form asked, ‘the Sepulchre Society?’
Fraser shrugged. ‘God knows. Politically correct claptrap. Leave our dead alone, that sort of hogwash. You’d think, wouldn’t you, in our spectacularly secular country, that sort of bigotry would be dead and gone.’
‘And you haven’t come across this group before?’
‘Never. As a local man, I thought perhaps you’d know something… You know, petitions, loonies stoning the Town Hall, that sort of thing.’
‘Might pay a visit to our local friendly crime correspondent,’ Maxwell pondered.
‘Could you do that?’ Fraser asked. ‘As a personal favour, I mean? I’m responsible for my people, Maxwell. And since the local gendarmerie are doing fuck all – oh, begging your fiancée’s pardon, of course.’
Maxwell gave a smile his best shot. ‘I know what this is all about,’ he said. ‘It’s because my bone-washing is such crap, isn’t it? You want me off the site.’
‘Man, man,’ Fraser smiled. ‘If I wanted you off the site, believe me, laddie, your feet wouldn’t touch the gravel. Is it your shout?’
Chapter Eleven
This was something Alison McCormick wasn’t looking forward to. It wasn’t so long ago that she’d been a confused kid herself, hating her school, her parents, herself. Somebody had been around to sort her out, hold her hand, put her straight. Had been, in the time-honoured American phrase, there for her. So here she was, this Tuesday morning, sitting in the dark, dismal lounge of the little railway cottage in downtown Leighford, being there for somebody else. Opposite her sat a sulky Michaela Reynolds, pouting under her studded nose. She was still wearing a skimpy top that showed her studded navel. At least, the girl had a sense of symmetry. To her left, equally petulant and with a bandaged left hand, her old man, Shaun, complete with crucifix earring and cropped head. At least he had had the sense of dignity to put on a shirt. Of Mrs Reynolds, there was no sign. She was, to quote both members of her family, ‘down the pub’, although they both stressed she was working. Pulling pints or pulling customers was not discussed.
‘We know you know where Annette is, Michaela,’ Alison McCormick was saying. ‘You owe it to her to tell us.’ The Leighford CID machine had growled into action. Maxwell had told Jacquie; Jacquie had told Alison. All they needed now was for the cow to tell the dairymaid.
‘It’s no good talking to her,’ her dad grunted. ‘She’s always been the same. Stubborn as all get out. Why don’t you tell ‘em, you stupid little…’
DC Dave Garstang had met men like Shaun Reynolds before. They beat their wives, their sons, their daughters. They worked if they had to and spent most of their wages on themselves. Saturday night it was down the Sports and Social with the lads, get trolleyed, then home to give the wife one, either a shag or a good kicking, depending on the mood he was in. He was one of those blokes, an old sergeant had once told him, who ought to report to the nick every Thursday for a bit of a smacking. Dave Garstang had never known those days, but he couldn’t help basking in a certain glow of their nostalgia.
‘Why don’t we pop into the kitchen, Mr Reynolds?’ he said. ‘Let the ladies talk? You can tell me all about your hand.’
‘My…? Oh, yeah. Yeah, all right, then.’ Shaun Reynolds wasn’t a snitch. But that poncey bastard with the stupid bow tie and even stupider hat had got right up his nose. Or was it vice versa? Yeah, he’d tell this copper all about that. He pointed to Alison. ‘I’m only next door, all right? You lay a finger on my girl…’
Alison watched him go, Garstang’s hand firmly on his shoulder. She waited for the door to close. ‘Michaela,’ the policewoman leaned forward. ‘Did Annette go off with Mr Fry, from school?’
The girl looked at her under sullen lids. This one could go either way. ‘Might of,’ she said.
‘When was this?’ Alison saw her way in.
‘Dunno. Last week. Week before. Whenever.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Look,’ Alison found this difficult. ‘If Annette has gone off with Mr Fry, she’s in trouble.’
‘Why?’
‘Have I got to spell it out?’ the policewoman asked. ‘She could get pregnant. Or worse.’
‘How do you mean, worse?’
‘What if she annoyed him,’ Alison asked. ‘Said the wrong thing? Did the wrong thing? He’s got a bit of a short fuse. What if he lashed out?’ Alison chose her moment. ‘You know what that’s like, don’t you?’
Michaela didn’t answer. She just stared dead ahead at the flickering, silent TV screen.
‘Michaela, you know Mr Fry’s wife is dead, don’t you?’
‘That’s got nothing to do with Annette,’ the girl said defiantly, her face twisted, her eyes flashing.
‘Maybe not,’ Alison leaned back, giving the girl space. ‘But he doesn’t even know yet. He doesn’t know she’s dead.’
‘You’d better find him, then,’ Michaela flounced.
‘We’re trying,’ Alison told her, trying to keep her own cool. ‘But you’re not helping.’
‘All right,’ the girl shouted. ‘All right. I dunno where he is, all right? She like texted me last Monday. She said she was in London. In a bed and breakfast. I spoke to her on the phone the next day.’
Breakthrough. ‘And how did she sound?’ Alison wanted to know.
‘Okay, I guess,’ Michaela shrugged. ‘She said it wasn’t like she expected.’
‘What wasn’t?’
‘Going away. Getting away from the Barlichway.’
‘That’s why she went?’
Michaela nodded. ‘You been to her place?’
Alison shook her head. ‘No. But I know the estate.’
‘Well, her mum’s a right cow. You’ve seen my dad – he’s got a temper on him, sure, but he loves us; me and my little bruvver. But Mrs Choker, she’s just a scrubber. Annette don’t know who her dad is to this day. Different dad every weekend. And more than one of ’em’s tried it on with her.’
‘Had sex, you mean?’
Michaela nodded. ‘She told me about it once,’ she said.
‘She doesn’t have to go back there, Michaela,’ Alison told her. ‘We’ve got hostels, places where she’ll be safe. She didn’t have to run away with Mr Fry.’
‘Mr Fry?’ Michaela frowned. ‘Who said she was with him?’
The people of the Advertiser had seen it all, of course. Prize peas the size of a goat’s testicles, a kid with a saucepan stuck on his head and, a long time before the local paper was even called the Advertiser, a flee
ting visit from Karl Marx. Even so, the sight before them that Tuesday lunchtime was odd. A man in a tweed hat pushed on top of a thatch of barbed wire hair, with a face that looked as though it had gone through a mangle, sitting with his head on sideways. Had they been, like Peter Maxwell, film buffs, they might have been reminded of Vanessa Redgrave, the very un-nunlike Mother Superior in The Devils. As it was, they were simply reminded of a non-technical person.
‘Er…you can tilt it, you know.’ One of the ladies of the front office hovered by his elbow. ‘Just turn this knob.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, raising his hat. ‘Always been a bit of a mystery to me, microfiche.’
Newsprint scudded past him on the screen in the Advertiser’s front office, with its smell of coffee and its appalling spider plants.
‘What is it you’re looking for, exactly?’ the busybody woman wondered.
‘Damned if I know,’ he sighed. ‘Ah. Mr James?’
‘I’m Reg James.’ The man before him was a shambles. He had just crashed his way from the inner office, through a pair of disreputable double doors. He had a piece of newspaper, aptly enough, stuck to a shaving wound on his chin.
‘Peter Maxwell.’ The Head of Sixth Form stood up to shake his hand. ‘Can I have a word?’
‘Jesus,’ the journalist said, staring at Maxwell’s face. ‘I’m due in court at two. Come on up. You can watch me eat my sandwich.’
‘Thanks,’ and the two of them disappeared through the double doors to ascend the spiral twist to the offices on the first floor. More smells of coffee, more spider plants, but this time, the carpet was buried under piles of papers, documents and boxes. Phones rang incessantly and computer screens flickered.
‘Want a coffee?’ James asked.
‘Love one,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Milk and two, please.’
‘Ah. Black, I’m afraid. Janice, have you seen my sweeteners?’
A girl with long blonde hair shook her head without looking up from her computer.
‘Thank you, Janice,’ James said, rolling his eyes heavenward. He leaned forward to Maxwell. ‘Came as a YTS girl eleven years ago. Can’t get rid of her.’ He was an unmade bed kind of a man, with sparse, straw-coloured hair and incisors that threatened to cross each other – or anybody looking at them funny. Maxwell remembered that William Bonney aka Billy the Kid looked not unlike Reginald James and he killed three of his four men because they laughed at his teeth. Did the infamous outlaw, Maxwell wondered briefly, have a piece of newspaper stuck to his chin, too?
He rummaged in a stash of less-than-savoury mugs and found one for Peter Maxwell. It was probably green. He poured something dark from the percolator on the desk. ‘Right,’ he passed the coffee to the Head of Sixth Form. ‘What can I…oh, hang on. Sardine paste?’ he proffered a limp sandwich, from a polythene bag. The thing sagged even further in the stale air of the newspaper office
‘Thanks, no.’ Maxwell did his best to smile.
‘You’re right,’ James hurled the effort into the nearest bin. ‘No imagination, Mrs James. Pleasant woman, up to a point, but no imagination. Of all the unspeakably erotic delights of Mainly Buns in the High Street, she has to pick sardines. So, we’ll skip lunch…again. Mr…Maxwell, is it? Your phone call said you needed help. Though I should point out,’ he peered more closely at the man’s face, ‘we don’t do unsubstantiated assault stories. Whoever put one on you will have to be contacted too. And if it’s not really a police matter…oh, mother of God!’ He suddenly grimaced. ‘Janice? When did you make this?’
‘Ascension Day.’ Janice still didn’t look up, but she was clearly not the dumb blonde she appeared to be.
‘Great. So, the face…’
‘No, no,’ Maxwell thought it best to forego the coffee and he put the mug down. ‘The face is by-the-bye. Have you, in all your long years at the Print-Face, Mr James, come across The Sepulchre Society of Sussex?’
James frowned. ‘Sepulchre Society of Sussex? It’s an alliterateur’s wet dream, certainly, but I can’t say… Hang on.’ And he wheeled his swivel chair across to a filing cabinet with a series of squeaks and clicks. ‘Sepulchre, sepulchre…’ he muttered as his fingers dabbled through files without number. ‘Look at that,’ he tutted. ‘The paperless office. Bloody marvellous, isn’t it? Seb Coe. Whoops, that should be in the aristocracy file now, of course. Selbourne. Jesus, that boring crap by Gilbert White. Why did we print that? Semen. Ah, quite a bit on that, unpleasantly enough. Serial killers. Oh, I remember this. Pretty good, even if I say it myself. No, sorry.’ He slammed the drawer shut. ‘Nothing on Sepulchre. It’s probably some rather downbeat antiquarian group. Having a reunion, are they? Sort of cremation barbecue?’
Only Reg James was laughing.
‘I think it’s a little more serious than that. What do you know of the dig at Leighford? On Staple Hill?’
‘Aha!’ James’ face lit up. ‘Now you’re talking my kind of language.’ He whipped out a notepad from nowhere. ‘Mind if I make a few notes?’
Maxwell quietly took the pencil out of the man’s hand. ‘I’d much rather you didn’t,’ he smiled.
‘All right.’ James leaned back, the pad discarded, and cradled his knee. ‘Off the record, is it?’
‘Two people connected with the dig are dead.’
‘Indeed they are,’ James said. ‘I attended DCI Hall’s Press Conference, of course. Didn’t exactly spill the beans, did he?’
‘I don’t know,’ Maxwell said. ‘I wasn’t there.’
‘Wait a minute. Two bodies.’ James was leaning forward now. ‘Just so we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet – you’re talking Dr David Radley and DS Martin Toogood.’
And Dr Samantha Welland makes three, Maxwell thought, but no one had gone public on that one yet and he kept it to himself. ‘I thought the Advertiser might have gone for a scoop on this,’ he said. ‘Juicy stuff for you boys, isn’t it?’
‘I hope that’s not a criticism,’ the journalist chortled.
‘Not at all,’ Maxwell said. ‘I’m sure the police are delighted. They’re always telling me how the members of the Fourth Estate are under their feet and up their arses at the same time.’
James narrowed his piggy eyes and clicked his fingers. ‘I know who you are now,’ he said. ‘You’re Peter Maxwell!’
‘Very good,’ the Head of Sixth Form nodded. ‘I think I told you that in the outer office and on the phone.’
‘No, no,’ James was chuckling, ‘You’re the Peter Maxwell. Head of Sixth Form at that venerable centre of excellence Leighford High by day, supersleuth by night. You’re the Jane Marple of the South Coast.’
‘Dear me,’ sighed Maxwell, Joan Hickson to a tee. ‘How preternaturally stupid of me.’
‘That’s bloody great!’ James laughed.
‘Personally,’ Maxwell wobbled his chin as well as he could, only having the one and given the extent of his bruising. ‘I preferred Margaret Rutherford.’
‘So did I!’ agreed James. ‘No, you’re a legend at my local,’ he said. ‘Ever since I saw you in the Grimond’s School case. The way you demolished that QC wanker in court. I’m surprised he didn’t hang up his wig after that. Most fun Winchester’s had in a very long time.’
‘Flattering, Mr James,’ Maxwell nodded, ‘but that was then.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, this is a turn up,’ the journalist sat, grinning broadly at his man. ‘DCI Hall know you’re on this one?’ His demeanour suddenly changed.
‘He might have an inkling.’ The Head of Sixth Form said. ‘What headway have the Fourth Estate made?’
‘Well, to put it in a nutshell, fuck all.’ He glanced up, hoping to have rattled Janice’s cage. She hadn’t moved. ‘No, at the press call Hall might as well have told us it was a sunny day in June and all the pixies had come out to play. Puts a whole new slant on “No comment” that bloke.’
‘Anybody covered the dig from day one?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Before there was any trouble, I mean?’
; ‘Let’s see,’ James was off on his travels again, whizzing across the flotex and thumbing his way through a different drawer. ‘Hard copy,’ he muttered. ‘You can’t beat it. Okay, let’s see.’
And he speed-read the papers in his hand, peering over a pair of specs that had appeared from nowhere on the end of his nose.
‘A bloke called Arthur Wimble made the first find, with a metal detector. You’ll love him, by the way, invented the word Anorak. He found a couple of coins.’
‘At the site?’
‘Apparently. This was back in March.’
‘That’s right,’ Maxwell said. ‘I vaguely remember it.’ Die though he would, rather than admit it, Peter Maxwell was quietly addicted to the Leighford Advertiser. He was at a funny age.
‘Of course, Mr Wimble met with an accident,’ James told him.
‘Oh?’
‘Fell downstairs one night.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘In his bungalow.’
‘Ah.’
‘One of my colleagues paid him a visit. He wasn’t in a talkative mood. Seemed he’s sold his metal detector and moved on. New house – one with an upstairs, in fact, which does seem to be courting disaster rather.’
‘Police involved?’
‘You’d have to ask them,’ James said. ‘Ah,’ the investigative journalist had found something else. ‘Another of my colleagues covered the finding of the first body. They called it – and you’ll like this, as an historian – that is what you are?’
‘It has been rumoured,’ Maxwell smiled.
‘Called him Frank Pledge. Get it?’
‘Got it,’ Maxwell admitted, and he was quietly impressed that James had. Frankpledge had replaced tithing in the later Middle Ages and was a sort of promise to be a good boy – electronic tagging of offenders in the days before tags or electronics. ‘When was this?’
‘Er…’ James checked his copy. ‘End of April. The body was identified by Dr David Radley of Wessex University as belonging to the mid to late Saxon period. Not a formal burial, in fact, but – and I quote – “a hasty inhumation on a hillside.” Radley seemed to think it might have been murder; the skull had been stove in with an axe. Good to see fine old traditions continuing, isn’t it?’
